Dear Mikki:

From your share, I don’t perceive your boyfriend as dishonest or untrustworthy. I don’t see evidence for such an evaluation. Him hiding his phone can easily be a response to your anxiety and suspicions, not that he has something to hide. Living with his ex girlfriend can be just an arrangement and nothing more (as unpleasant as it feels to you and would to me as well).

You started your post with feeling crazy for seeking validation from strangers. I believe it is more sane to seek validation from strangers than from family members who have proved to be invalidating. Actually, I wasted decades of my life trying to earn my mother’s validation. I would have had better results aiming at strangers.

But that’s beside the point. I read your history and it makes your trust issues very understandable. No, I do not believe that you are “too broken… beyond repair”- you can learn how to manage your anxiety, your distress, without reacting to it by damaging your relationship with your boyfriend or behave destructively otherwise. There is also psychotherapy with a competent therapist and/ or support groups that can help you heal from your traumatic early life events.

Back to my mother- you wrote that your mother committed suicide when you were five and that “She was my entire world… 42 years later, I still remember. When she died, my life instantly became this big black hole of fear, loneliness and uncertainty.” That caught my attention because when I was five my mother threatened to commit suicide and that (with repeated threats of suicide over 20 or 30 years on her part), did create a “big black hole of fear, loneliness and uncertainty” in my life. I used to wonder if it would have been better for me if she did carry it through, so I wouldn’t keep being scared. And I wondered if I would have been adopted then, and how better my life would have been if I was adopted.

For a little girl, the mother is the most important person in the whole wide world.

anita